Axis History Forum

This is an apolitical forum for discussions on the Axis nations and related topics hosted by Marcus Wendel's Axis History Factbook in cooperation with Christian Ankerstjerne’s Panzerworld and Christoph Awender's WW2 day by day.
Founded in 1999.

Can anyone inform me on an individal named Werther--i am reading Paul Carells' Scorched Earth and this individal is mentioned as an inside man of the Soviets , relating information on the upcomming operation Citadel. Did or does he exist and if not any ideas on who this person is (was).?

Hello wm,Werther's identity is one of the unsolved mysteries of WW2. All we can guess is that he was someone in Hitler's HQ, and many have been suspected, including Martin Bormann. He has never been identified. Search on google and you will find 4 pages of entries on Werther, and theories about his identity, but at the end you still won't know who he was. It is sort of an approriate name. Werher was a tragic character in one of Goethe's novels.Regards, Harry

Someone somewhere has probably already thought of this, but Werther was probably not really a spy ring inside the German High Command. It may have been the intelligence that the British derived from Ultra and passed on to the Soviets. The British did after all warn the Soviets that Germany was about to attack the Soviet Union. Stalin chose to disregard the warning as a provocation by the British who he thought wanted to see Germany and the Soviet Union go to war against each other.

wmcdowell1 wrote:Can anyone inform me on an individal named Werther--i am reading Paul Carells' Scorched Earth and this individal is mentioned as an inside man of the Soviets , relating information on the upcomming operation Citadel. Did or does he exist and if not any ideas on who this person is (was).?

There is an article ‘Spies, Ciphers and 'Zitadelle': Intelligence and the Battle of Kursk, 1943’ by Timothy P. Mulligan in the Journal of Contemporary History 1987, that looks into the Rote Drei network and their information on Citadel. To cut a long story short they weren’t very accurate.

A simple economist with an unhealthy interest in military and intelligence history..... http://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.com/